Lyudmila Bilodid, the founder of the Beloded Landscaping office, a valid member of the Society of Garden Designers (SGD) and a member of the board of the Guild of Landscape Architects of Ukraine (GLAU), tells about how to stop the city dweller, who is always in a hurry, and encourage him to dialogue with the landscape.
Lyudmila Bilodid, landscape designer, director and founder of Beloded Landscaping bureau
Sensual subtleties
Have you ever gotten lost in the woods? Have you tried to analyze what exactly made you move further and further, get carried away to the point of losing all sense of time, forget about companions and affairs? Each introduction to a new green space - a garden, a park or a small city square - can be like an adventure and an exciting journey.
Metaversion of the new world: from interactivity to virtuality
For some, watching plants grow and develop is a continuous show that gives the attentive viewer deep emotions and joy. But the life rhythms of nature and the modern citizen are so different that many of us need a trigger, an accent, a key to stop and pause. Something that forces us to change the route, to choose not the shortest path down the street, but the path through the park. Something that encourages you to sit down on a bench or deck chair and immerse yourself in contemplation.
The Grand Milestone Museum and Park, Xi'an, China. Image source: TROP: terrains + open space and Weimar Group
Any quality landscape is not only a visual shell, but also a content: a multi-layered cake of abstractions, metaphors and poetry. This has always been the case: the landscapes of Andre Lenotre, Claude Monet, Frederick Law Olmsted, Antonio Gaudi, and Charles Jenks are filled not only with the colors of the plant world, but also with meaningful meanings.
Sarah Price, an English garden designer, believes that portals play the main role in attracting the viewer. It is not about the entrance areas to the park and garden, or rather, not only about them. Special landmarks are meant that guide the guest from location to location and tell a story. Not necessarily the history of the garden itself - it can be a legend, a fairy tale, a story on any topic.
An opening in the thickets, through which a picturesque landscape seems to open accidentally, a secret garden room, a labyrinth or a winding path that promises adventure and surprise around the corner, a stream that leads us along a linear park - all this turns adults into children who once excitedly explored an unfamiliar and full of adventure world and ran after paper boats in the rain ditch.
Through Water and Twinkling Lights - Museum Exit to The Grand Milestone Park, Xi'an, China. Image source: TROP: terrains + open space and Weimar Group
Hiroki Matsuura, the architect with whom Beloded Landscaping collaborates in the implementation of projects in the capital's UNIT.City, always starts with a story that transforms into a concept and then into a project. In architecture and landscape, an attentive viewer will always find hints and clues to what the author wanted to say.
In the Main Plaza, for example, it is a story about biodiversity - Bento Boxes (whose shape is dictated by images of a traditional Japanese lunch box) are filled with various plants that can be studied, like showcases in a botanical museum.
The key to creating emotional responses is the narrative format. It is according to the narrative principle, when the best qualities of a park or garden are revealed not immediately, but one after another, that the brightest of public parks are designed: they always have a story, a place for intrigue and a hint of adventure.
This tradition is followed by modern architects all over the world. For example, The Grand Milestone, a fledgling park around the Jiujiang Cultural Center in the most expensive area of the booming Chinese city of Xi'an, attracts passers-by with a walkway that looks like a writhing dragon.
The key to creating emotional responses is the narrative format, where the best qualities of a park or garden are not revealed at once, but one after the other
The white ribbon is dancing; sometimes it rises, allowing you to look at the tops of the trees, then it descends, almost hiding in lush clouds of cereals: miscanthus, penisetum and pampas grass. And the exit to the garden from the museum is certainly one of the best embodiments of the portal. The semi-transparent installation, like a veil, hides the details of the landscape, subtly hinting at them - the silhouette of a lonely multi-trunk tree in the courtyard invites you to take a walk.
The team of landscape architects TROP: terrains + open space and Weimar Group managed to create a decidedly modern landscape without sacrificing the identity of a traditional oriental garden. "Design without a soul will not be able to impress anyone," say the designers, and you can't argue with them.
Immersiveness has been one of the main research topics at the world's major architecture and design events in recent years. So, in October 2021, at the London Architecture Festival, garden installations and pavilions were installed on the distance from Kensington to Chelsea in a sequential order, forming the South Ken Green Trail. The purpose of creating the trail was to attract passers-by to the cultural study of the area.
Moonscapes at Villa Orticolario as part of the 2017 festival. Image source: viaggi.corriere.it. Photo: Luciano Movio
By the way, everyone knows about the flower show in Chelsea, but the Orticolario festival, one of the most sensual events in the field of garden design, was undeservedly in the blind spot. In the last two years, due to the pandemic, the festival was not held, but before that, starting in 2009, every October in the gardens of the Villa Erba on Lake Como in Italy, European aesthetes and snobs gathered to enjoy the objects of garden design, collections of rare plants and art installations.
Orticolario is not focused on the sale of novelties of selection and agricultural technology, it is designed to develop themes and philosophies inspired by nature. Horticulture, botany, landscape, art and design are all disciplines working to evolve the idea of a pleasure garden that has no conceptual boundaries. The organizers of Orticolario are betting on immersiveness. Portals and artifacts are hidden behind completely traditional stands and exhibits: secret rooms; mistletoe chandeliers suspended among giant redwoods; tables served directly in wet moss for a candlelit meal.
Even the beds and flower beds here are sometimes transformed into a musical instrument: at one of the festivals, the Giacomarra Architect studio presented its installation Empathy Garden, where strings were stretched over supports on containers with aromatic herbs, connected to a computer-reverberator, which transforms vibrations from the wind into sounds
Light and number
Modern artists have been expressing their phenomenological experience based on the natural forces of nature in the light for more than a dozen years, but today the walls of museums are becoming cramped for their creative experiments. Immersive art spills out beyond the interior spaces.
The LED trees of Charles Gadeken, one of the most popular industrial artists in the USA, are organically integrated into the living greenery. They decorate the promenades of cities in California, including Palo Alto. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, Gadeken designed Entwined, a "forest group" of six-meter-tall steel trees with multi-colored, glowing cubes instead of leaves. During the pandemic, this place became one of the most visited. Charles calls his techno-sculptures "portals into the collective consciousness."
Interactive landscape installation Aqueous at Burning Man 2017. Photo: Bill Hornstein / flickr
Digital technologies are the "magic lantern" of the new century, capable of turning the dullest everyday life into a game landscape full of surprises. For example, the famous Burning Man festival has long since turned from a gathering of crazy artists into a creative laboratory and testing ground for cross-platform experiments, including in the field of landscape design. If light installations can turn an ordinary desert into a Wonderland, their potential in the urban landscape is truly limitless.
The Alive Together International Open Air Light Festival in Beijing is one of the main events of the year in China, as is every new performance by the light artists group teamLab, no matter where in the world it takes place. Buildings, people and trees become the canvas for teamLab, and their shows often take place outdoors.
Entwined is an installation by Charles Gadeken, installed in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, USA. Photo: Jason Chinn / secretsanfrancisco.com
For example, the installation "Resistance and Resonance" was shown in the cherry orchards surrounding the ruins of Fukuoka Castle. Ovoids - glowing egg-shaped sculptures were installed between the trees. Human touches caused the ovoid to change color and make a sound, which, in turn, was responded to by other sculptures. Any visitor could start a chain reaction of flashes and sounds, a wave. She rolled through the garden and faded out, coming across the ruins of an old castle.
Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde, founder of Studio Roosegaarde, can be considered a pioneer in the field of creating immersive art landscapes using new technologies. His innovative approaches turn our ideas about the relationship between nature, artificial environment and man upside down. Back in 2007, Roosegaard transformed the Maas River embankment in Rotterdam into a truly magical and mystical place.
The life rhythms of nature and the modern citizen are so different that many of us need a trigger, an accent, a key to stop and pause. Something that forces us to change the route, to choose not the shortest path through the street, but the one that leads through the park
The DUNE interactive landscape is a dynamic installation consisting of thousands of LED lights on a flexible fiberglass base, integrated into the soil along the embankment at a distance of about 100 m. The prototype for the landscape was marram grass, or ammophylla, a grass that grows on sand dunes along the embankment. Thickets of techno marram responded to human presence and movement with flickers, flashes and sound effects.
DUNE graced the waterfront in Rotterdam for six years, and then went on a long world tour: it is displayed both in closed museum galleries and in squares, and provides unique opportunities to transform familiar spaces.
Alive Together International Open Air Light Festival in Beijing, China. Image source: People's Daily
Roozgaard's "farming" experiment is no less famous. A field with an area of 20 square meters. m, intended for growing leeks, the artist illuminated with phyto-projectors. Light directed at growing onions stimulates biosynthesis, making the plants resistant to disease and pests. Thus, the GROW installation, which is charged by the sun during the day, allows to reduce the amount of pesticides used in agricultural technology.
The onion field in the light of GROW resembles a forest clearing in the movie "Avatar", and of course, it is impossible to consider GROW as just a new agricultural approach: it is both art and a mature technology that solves an actual practical task. "GROW reimagines the landscape as a living work of art," says Daan Roosgaard.
DUNE interactive landscape in Rotterdam by Studio Roosegaarde. Photo source: Studio Roosegaarde
Well, LIQUID LANDSCAPE, an anti-sculpture that Daan opened in the summer of 2021 at the Arte Sella open-air art museum in Trentino, disrupts the notion of solid ground underfoot. A grass carpet on fifty square meters, hidden in the middle of a picturesque meadow, begins to bend and spring under a person's feet, like a trampoline or a water mattress.
To create this effect, a liquid mud tank was covered with a flexible multi-layered "carpet" of nutrients and lawn grass seeds. The liquid base in no way disturbs the normal vegetation of cereals. Most likely, the grass is threatened by museum visitors, for whom Roosegaard's "Liquid Landscape" has become a real sensation.
Art: modern, interesting, merciless
It would seem that the landscape of the High Line, the most popular park in New York, is perfect and does not need any additions. It is visited by about 7 million people a year - this is more than any of the museums of the Big Apple. Pete Udolph's compositions and "good bones" — a structure created by landscape architect James Corner and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro — are already key to success.
But competently constructed management and constant evolution are no less important. Through the efforts of Cecilia Alemany, Director of High Line Art and Curator of Exhibitions, the High Line has become the only park in New York with a special multimedia program of contemporary art, offered to the public, regardless of the weather, all year round and absolutely free.
The Looking Glass virtual art exhibition in the High Line Park, USA. Photo source: nyt.com
The branch of The Spur, the latest phase of construction of the High Line, solved the problem of shortage of space for events. At the final point of the park, at the exit to 10th Avenue, there is a square square with terraces made of teak wood, on which it is so pleasant to sit and lie.
In its center is the "Pedestal" - literally, a pedestal made of granite, on which the works of monumental art will change every year and a half. For now, it is decorated with a five-meter bronze bust by Simone Lee.
And even the North Branch, the oldest part of the High Line, opened to the public in 2009, in 2018 received a sculpture by Phyllida Barlow, a composition of two massive concrete slabs mounted on steel stilts. The pile of blocks and slabs has an unusual look to the tender eye, but critics were not outraged until April 2021, when Barlow's sculpture was replaced by a rusting industrial tank with dry wood on top - an installation by Ibrahim Maham called "57 Forms of Freedom", and next to it flew " Drone" by Sam Durant.
"19.604692°N 72.218596°W" is a sculpture by Firelei Baez commissioned by High Line Art. Photo: Timothy Schenck
After that, it became obvious to even the most uneducated that the director of High Line Art, Cecilia Alemany, is not prone to reflections, but is set on the boldest experiments. She sees her mission as bringing "new, powerful, thought-provoking works of art that generate and amplify some of the most pressing global topics and debates" to the masses. These include the virtual art exhibition The Looking Glass, organized by High Line Art together with The Shed.
Visitors to the park in July and August 2021 could encounter Nina Chanel Abney's soaring "Imaginary Friend," Olafur Eliasson's "Uncertain Cloud," and Precious Okoemon's installation of flowers sprouting through cobblestones. However, all these wonders of augmented reality could only be seen with the help of a VR headset or smartphone application.
Emptiness as an integral condition
I am not advocating for landscape architects to take on the role of sculptors, light artists, or media artists. Our time is the time of collaborations and cross-platform thinking, and if we want to include modern public art objects, interactive and immersive installations in the landscape, then we have to make sure that the landscape is ready to receive them.
In the article "Public space as a display" (read more in volume 34 of PRAGMATIKA.MEDIA) art critic Kateryna Rai said that in Kyiv there is an acute shortage of locations that are suitable for installing art objects. And I see a problem here not only of an organizational and administrative nature. When designing new public spaces, architects forget to take into account the possibility of integrating art objects into them - temporary or permanent.
Five Conversations is an installation by Lubaina Khimid, commissioned by High Line Art. Photo: Timothy Schenck
It is necessary to provide not only for communications (at least - the supply of electricity), but also for free square meters, that is, to program voids at visual intersections in the project. They are needed not only for physical installations, but also for virtual objects, such as those presented in the High Line Park, to help focus the viewer's eye on the main thing.
In Kyiv, I encounter a kind of general intolerance to empty spaces at almost every step. There is no reserve for immersive pop-up events in park projects. Areas that could be used as a display, just so that sometimes something unexpected, intriguing, strange would appear on them, are cluttered with some kind of concrete curb with a ridiculous plaster vase or an "antique" fountain, or giant multi-colored garbage cans.
But tanks can at least be removed, but park vases or fake plaster sculptures are usually monumental. These are reflections that we inherited from the times of the USSR, when the alternative to the pioneer with a trumpet was a girl with an oar, and it was obvious that this composition would remain unchanged for decades. But today we have truly unlimited choices and possibilities for progressive experiments. And we are destroying promising voids and with them - the possibility of the evolution of our landscapes.
The task of the future in a global sense is to turn abstract images into targeted statements
Even Steve Jobs urged not to use technology for technology's sake. Each design solution must correspond to the functions, and in this matter we remain on the former modernist positions. But one of the main functions of gardens and parks is to give joy and expand the comfort zone.
"It is not enough to create functional products that are understandable and easy to use, we also need to create things that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun and yes, beauty to people's lives," said Don Norman, an American author, scientist and design researcher. His words are absolutely true regarding garden design, landscape architecture. The task of the future in a global sense is to turn abstract images into targeted statements. And this means that the share of artistic and artistic manifestations within the framework of traditional green typologies will only increase.
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